TSA spent $1 bln on 'body language' program

After investing $1 billion in behavior detection techniques and training since 2007, the Transportation Security Administration has little to show for its efforts, the New York Times stated in a new report.

According to the newspaper, critics of the
TSA’s attempt to read body language claim there’s no evidence to
suggest the agency has been able to link chosen passengers to
anything beyond carrying drugs or holding undeclared currency,
much less a terrorist attack. In fact, a review of numerous
studies seems to suggest that even those trained to look for
various tics are no more capable of identifying liars than normal
individuals.

“The common-sense notion that liars betray themselves through
body language appears to be little more than a cultural
fiction,” Maria Hartwig, a psychologist at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice in New York City, told the Times.

The TSA’s body language program has also been critiqued by the
Government Accountability Office, which found it to be
ineffective and recommended cutting its funding going forward. As
RT reported last year, its conclusion was that human
ability to read body language was “the same as or slightly
better than chance.”

“Available evidence does not support whether behavioral
indicators, which are used in the Transportation Security
Administration’s (TSA) Screening of Passengers by Observation
Techniques (SPOT) program, can be used to identify persons who
may pose a risk to aviation security,” the GAO report read.

Through a review of various studies dating back over the last 60
years, researchers found that people were only able to pick out
liars 47 percent of the time, while attempts to identify people
who told the truth were more successful at 61 percent. With an
average rate of 54 percent, however, the methods could not be
considered effective, especially when accuracy rates fell further
in cases where an individual had to rely only on body language –
and could not, for example, hear someone speak.

The GAO also disputed the TSA’s claim that its procedures helped
single out high-risk passengers more effectively than random
screening. Out of more than 30,000 passengers highlighted every
year by behavior detection methods, the GAO found that less than
one percent were arrested. None of the arrests were in connection
to terror plots.

According to Dr. Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago,
people in general tend to overinflate their perceived ability to
read another person’s body language.

“When you’re lying or cheating, you know it and feel guilty,
and it feels to you as if your emotions must be leaking out
through your body language,” he said to the Times. “You
have an illusion that your emotions are more transparent than
they actually are, and so you assume others are more transparent
than they actually are, too.”